Unlocking customer centricity: Question everything, assume nothing

Our recent Customer Centricty study, in collaboration with Google, saw us speak to over 100 brands about what customer centricity maturity looks like, and what are the building blocks in becoming a business which prioritises the customer. 

When we collated our findings, for our white paper 'The State of Customer Centricity', we saw groundbreaking insights. We found that customer centric organisations grow faster, have more satisfied employees and are more nimble. 

From our research, we were able to extract the primary behaviours we found in the most mature organisations, the ones benefiting seeing revenue growth, retaining staff and having agility to change. These are the five keys to customer centricity: 

1. De-centralize control
2. Question everything, assume nothing
3. Prioritize employee experience
4. Adopt a customer centric org chart
5. Communicate relentlessly

In our last blog, we looked at Decentralising control - the first key to customer centricity, in this one, we move on to our second Key; Question everything, assume nothing.

High-performing organisations were more likely to use data to inform decision-making – across all levels of the organisation. When setting a strategy, high-performing organisations also took into account market trends, customer insights and qualitative data - namely customer stories. Qualitative data can be extremely valuable as it can give you a greater understanding of your customer, helping you make sense of other types of data you collect.

Fewer than half of low-performing organisations brought customer stories into strategic meetings. More than three-quarters of high-performing organisations did this. The value of qualitative data is that it helps make sense of other forms of data by giving a visceral understanding of the customer. If quantitative data is the ‘what’, qualitative data is the ‘why’.

We believe the explanation for the superior performance of the mature organisations is that data-informed organisations make better choices. The fact that we saw it at all levels suggests that high-performing organisations have a culture that rewards people for seeking out evidence and information—specifically, data and stories about their customers.

Download the full white paper now to access the full list of Keys and how you can kick start a Customer Centricity programme within your organisation. You can also take our Self Assessment to receive your customer centricity score and recommendations for how to improve.